This paper describes the submissions of the team of the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Tasks on Morpheme Segmentation and Inflection Generation. Our submissions use a character-level neural transducer that operates over traditional edit actions. While this model has been found particularly wellsuited for low-resource settings, using it with large data quantities has been difficult. Existing implementations could not fully profit from GPU acceleration and did not efficiently implement mini-batch training, which could be tricky for a transition-based system. For this year’s submission, we have ported the neural transducer to PyTorch and implemented true mini-batch training. This has allowed us to successfully scale the approach to large data quantities and conduct extensive experimentation. We report competitive results for morpheme segmentation (including sharing first place in part 2 of the challenge). We also demonstrate that reducing sentence-level morpheme segmentation to a word-level problem is a simple yet effective strategy. Additionally, we report strong results in inflection generation (the overall best result for large training sets in part 1, the best results in low-resource learning trajectories in part 2). Our code is publicly available.

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion is an important component in many speech technologies, but until recently there were no multilingual benchmarks for this task. The second iteration of the SIGMORPHON shared task on multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion features many improvements from the previous year’s task (Gorman et al. 2020), including additional languages, a stronger baseline, three subtasks varying the amount of available resources, extensive quality assurance procedures, and automated error analyses. Four teams submitted a total of thirteen systems, at best achieving relative reductions of word error rate of 11% in the high-resource subtask and 4% in the low-resource subtask.

This paper describes the submission by the team from the Department of Computational Linguistics, Zurich University, to the Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion (G2P) Task 1 of the SIGMORPHON 2021 challenge in the low and medium settings. The submission is a variation of our 2020 G2P system, which serves as the baseline for this year’s challenge. The system is a neural transducer that operates over explicit edit actions and is trained with imitation learning. For this challenge, we experimented with the following changes: a) emitting phoneme segments instead of single character phonemes, b) input character dropout, c) a mogrifier LSTM decoder (Melis et al., 2019), d) enriching the decoder input with the currently attended input character, e) parallel BiLSTM encoders, and f) an adaptive batch size scheduler. In the low setting, our best ensemble improved over the baseline, however, in the medium setting, the baseline was stronger on average, although for certain languages improvements could be observed.

This paper describes the submission by the team from the Institute of Computational Linguistics, Zurich University, to the Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion (G2P) Task of the SIGMORPHON 2020 challenge. The submission adapts our system from the 2018 edition of the SIGMORPHON shared task. Our system is a neural transducer that operates over explicit edit actions and is trained with imitation learning. It is well-suited for morphological string transduction partly because it exploits the fact that the input and output character alphabets overlap. The challenge posed by G2P has been to adapt the model and the training procedure to work with disjoint alphabets. We adapt the model to use substitution edits and train it with a weighted finite-state transducer acting as the expert policy. An ensemble of such models produces competitive results on G2P. Our submission ranks second out of 23 submissions by a total of nine teams.

Historical text normalization, the task of mapping historical word forms to their modern counterparts, has recently attracted a lot of interest (Bollmann, 2019; Tang et al., 2018; Lusetti et al., 2018; Bollmann et al., 2018;Robertson and Goldwater, 2018; Bollmannet al., 2017; Korchagina, 2017). Yet, virtually all approaches suffer from the two limitations: 1) They consider a fully supervised setup, often with impractically large manually normalized datasets; 2) Normalization happens on words in isolation. By utilizing a simple generative normalization model and obtaining powerful contextualization from the target-side language model, we train accurate models with unlabeled historical data. In realistic training scenarios, our approach often leads to reduction in manually normalized data at the same accuracy levels.

We present a neural transition-based model that uses a simple set of edit actions (copy, delete, insert) for morphological transduction tasks such as inflection generation, lemmatization, and reinflection. In a large-scale evaluation on four datasets and dozens of languages, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems on low and medium training-set sizes and is competitive in the high-resource setting. Learning to apply a generic copy action enables our approach to generalize quickly from a few data points. We successfully leverage minimum risk training to compensate for the weaknesses of MLE parameter learning and neutralize the negative effects of training a pipeline with a separate character aligner.

We present a simple approach to the generation and labeling of extraction patterns for coding political event data, an important task in computational social science. We use weak supervision to identify pattern candidates and learn distributed representations for them. Given seed extraction patterns from existing pattern dictionaries, we use label propagation to label pattern candidates. We present two case studies. i) We derive patterns of acceptable quality for a number of international relations & conflicts categories using pattern candidates of O’Connor et al (2013). ii) We derive patterns for coding protest events that outperform an established set of Tabari / Petrarch hand-crafted patterns.

We employ imitation learning to train a neural transition-based string transducer for morphological tasks such as inflection generation and lemmatization. Previous approaches to training this type of model either rely on an external character aligner for the production of gold action sequences, which results in a suboptimal model due to the unwarranted dependence on a single gold action sequence despite spurious ambiguity, or require warm starting with an MLE model. Our approach only requires a simple expert policy, eliminating the need for a character aligner or warm start. It also addresses familiar MLE training biases and leads to strong and state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks.

Our submissions for the GDI 2017 Shared Task are the results from three different types of classifiers: Naïve Bayes, Conditional Random Fields (CRF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our CRF-based run achieves a weighted F1 score of 65% (third rank) being beaten by the best system by 0.9%. Measured by classification accuracy, our ensemble run (Naïve Bayes, CRF, SVM) reaches 67% (second rank) being 1% lower than the best system. We also describe our experiments with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures. Since they performed worse than our non-neural approaches we did not include them in the submission.